I don't even remember Kimmel being negative towards Leno even though he has been a HUGE Letterman fan all along. Though I admit I don't watch full episodes of Kimmel much. (I record basically ALL of them, and watch a few funny snippets here and there.. and watch letterman though I have a zillion banked up and sometimes just listen to the audio.)

When NBC returned you to the "Tonight Show," you were painted as the bad guy who took Conan O'Brien's job away. And a lot of the people attacking you were fellow entertainers, like David Letterman.

The thing with Dave is, he's funny. Please. We're comics. I take potshots all the time. Dave always had a punch line. Dave always put the joke first.

But he wasn't the only one. Jimmy Kimmel went after you as well.

I don't quite get that one. Jimmy Kimmel's very funny, I think he's very talented, but he's a radio guy. It's a different sensibility, where you attack the guy on the other station hoping to get into a fight with him.

He appeared in a bit on your show and proceeded to take you apart for the Conan fiasco.

I didn't edit it out. I said, "It's my fault, I walked into it. Keep it in."

Boy, Fallon is really gonna have to be better on the Tonight Show than his Late Night tonight would indicate and surely they put a lot of effort into a show that all the people watching the last Jay Leno would see at least the beginning.

The two Jimmys will duke it out for the title of #1 but the new King of Late Night Television is Lorne Michaels.

I don't think that Fallon will do better than O'Brien's Tonight Show ratings in the long run but if he can attract enough of the younger demo, NBC will at least pretend to be happy with his ratings.

I think the one who will really feel the squeeze will be Letterman as:
A) He has nothing left to prove.
B) He will be competing with Fallon (and Michaels) for a more limited pool of guests and I suspect that unless he gets another ratings boost, he'll get less of the A List guests than Fallon.

I think Conan screwed up by (1) moving to L.A. and leaving what worked very well and (2) bringing back Andy Richter.

(1) The only thing he left was his location -- his entire staff went with him from New York to L.A.

As far as I can remember, the concept of a Conan "Tonight Show" in New York didn't even occur to anyone; NBC was of the mindset that "'The Tonight Show' moved to Los Angeles in 1972, and that's it," so they started from that thought and built Conan the new studio at Universal, etc.

(2) Obviously, it's a matter of personal taste, but I think Conan just "works" much better when he's with Andy than he did in the last few years of "Late Night" when Andy wasn't on the show.

I'm not aware of any research that showed that the low ratings for Conan's "Tonight Show" were because of the presence of Andy Richter, but feel free to point me to something.

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The scorned host has moved on, but he hasn’t forgotten the slight. During his monologue Thursday, O’Brien took a shot at his former network, saying, “NBC has the Olympics. It’s a big deal. NBC will finally get to show somebody who’s okay with passing the torch.”

Apparently Leno is starting stand up gigs almost immediately so we'll see if his vision of humor is still relevant.

I may not be the right person to judge (because I'm also old) but I prefer Leno's monologue among the current (or recently canceled) choices.

Leno stopped doing stand up shows. Even during the height of the Tonight Show, Leno was doing 120-150 standup dates a year. He's a total workaholic. He does standup every weekend and almost every night when the show is dark.

Leno stopped doing stand up shows. Even during the height of the Tonight Show, Leno was doing 120-150 standup dates a year. He's a total workaholic. He does standup every weekend and almost every night when the show is dark.

Leno stopped doing stand up shows. Even during the height of the Tonight Show, Leno was doing 120-150 standup dates a year. He's a total workaholic. He does standup every weekend and almost every night when the show is dark.

He just loves working.

He'll keep doing his car show too.

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Jeff
Proud to use my TiVo improperly
President of the TiVoShanan Fan Club

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Interesting article. The author points out again and again how bad Leno is, with old, tired, and outdated jokes. But yet he feels bad for him.

I didn't read the article.. I will probably keep track of a bunch of these articles and read them eventually.

The *one* thing I feel "sorry" for Leno about is his prime time show. While I didn't watch *full* episodes of it regularly, I did like I do with the late night shows (including his) and recorded it and FFed through for the funny bits. It *wasn't* exactly the Tonight Show, but did feel familiar, and still had new segments in it.

Basically, I don't begrudge him for actually taking the prime time show and trying out something familiar but still new-ish, even though it got horrible ratings.